Quotes On Comics

Life isn’t divided into genres.

Back when I wrote Watchmen I still trusted the viperous bastards, I had a different feeling about American superhero comics and what they meant.

100 million dollars – that’s what they spent on the Watchmen film which nearly didn’t come out because of the lawsuit, that’s what they spent on The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen which shouldn’t have come out but did anyway.

We had one particularly dense Hollywood producer say, ‘You don’t even have to do the book, just stick your name on this idea and I’ll make the film and you’ll get a lot of money – it’s… The League Of Extraordinary Animals!

There is more integrity in comics.

The main reason why comics can’t work as films is largely because everybody who is ultimately in control of the film industry is an accountant.

The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen film cost 100 million because Sean Connery wanted 17 million of that – and a bigger explosion that the one he’d had in his last film.

It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants.

There was a clause that essentially said that, if in the future, there were any documents or contracts that I refused to sign, DC was entitled to appoint an attorney to sign them instead.

There’s a widespread cultural barrenness across art and political culture.

I have largely, completely given up on the comics industry.

There hasn’t been a more sophisticated comic released in the 25 years since, which I find profoundly depressing, because [Watchmen] was intended to be something that expanded the possibilities of comics rather than what it has apparently become — a massive psychological stumbling block that the rest of the industry has yet to find a…

Everybody is becoming [a superhero].

Will Eisner is the single person most responsible for giving comics its brains.

Comics are more energetic, more vital than novels.

I’m completely happy and confident about the comics medium because even if, as I hope, the comics industry collapses tomorrow, then there’ll still be people who have access to a Woolworth’s jotter and a cheap Biro – that was all I used when I was doing my first groundbreaking series of comics when I was…

Things that we did in Watchmen on paper could be frankly horrible or sensationalist or unpleasant if you were to interpret them literally through the medium of cinema.

There’s something very warm and soothing about looking at an old Batman comic you haven’t looked at since you were eight years old.

I remember thinking after September 11, “This has surely got to be the beginning of the end of American superheroes.” Because one of the reasons I suspect the superhero rose in America and nowhere else is American impunity, or the sense of impunity.

Comics were for children and for intellectually subnormal people, whereas graphic novel sounds like a much more sophisticated proposition.

It has been proven — I believe by Pentagon tests in the late ’80s — that comics are actually the best medium for imparting information to somebody in a form that they will retain and remember.

It has occurred to me that the superhero really only originates in America.

I’m not at all interested in the comics industry.